Beautiful pie! And I can't believe how much wood you have in the yard! It's a lifetime of never ending pizzas! =)

Actually, what you see in the video isn't even close to half of the firewood I have. About ten paces to the right of my oven is about 3/4 cord, all split. Then, about 25 paces to the left of my oven, which is actually in my father in-law's vegetable field, there's an 16 foot long by 5 foot high stack of Oak logs.

Thanks for the compliments, everyone! Where I am in my pizza making so far, I attribute to all of the stuff I gathered here on these forums.

Actually, what you see in the video isn't even close to half of the firewood I have. About ten paces to the right of my oven is about 3/4 cord, all split. Then, about 25 paces to the left of my oven, which is actually in my father in-law's vegetable field, there's an 16 foot long by 5 foot high stack of Oak logs.

A lifetime of neverending pizzas indeed!!

There's a show on in the US right now about "hoarders" and I'm thinking about calling them about your wood stores!

Actually, I had two bad dreams in the last 3 nights. In one of them, there was an earthquake and my oven collapsed. To make matters worse, some of the neighborhood kids were frolicking in its ruins. The latest one, probably influenced by this thread, I returned home to find that all of my firewood had been stolen. There I stood in the middle of my yard, in disbelief, wondering who else in this small town would possibly have any need for that much firewood!!

I keep rewatching your video to study the technique... good stuff! And less than 90 second bake for a gorgeous pie!

I'm going to have to think about reducing how much dough I put into my dough box (putting 20x 7.6 oz doughs) since they seem to meld together on final rise and have become very challenging to take out round....

Fidel,Thanks for sharing! Enjoyed reading about your experiences...great videos, photos....wish you were closer to have someone to commiserate with.

Thanks! I wish I had someone closer too. Actually, there is an Aussie guy living about an hour from my house who built a WFO and has a passion for NP, but he's been in and out of work here in Japan recently, and his wife doesn't really approve of him indulging in his pizza hobby much anyway. When we both finished our ovens, we visited eachother once each for pizza parties. Since November last year, we haven't met up at all for pizza...or even to talk pizza.

I keep rewatching your video to study the technique... good stuff! And less than 90 second bake for a gorgeous pie!

I'm going to have to think about reducing how much dough I put into my dough box (putting 20x 7.6 oz doughs) since they seem to meld together on final rise and have become very challenging to take out round....

Thanks! I was having the same issue too. When I first bought those dough boxes, I had only 3 and was putting 12 balls in them for some of my bigger parties, and later reduced that to 11, 4 on each side with 3 in the center area gaps. They melded together anyway, but the latter bought me a little more time than before. Now, I have 6 boxes and go with only 8 per box. However, for a big party, I'll put 11 in the first box of dough I use at the beginning of the party, since the balls will still be separated. This may change as I increase the time they spend balled as opposed to bulk. Still experimenting!!

So I after some discussion with Chau regarding some mysteries about my last dough, the cold ferment and yeast levels, I decided to document everything(video) as well as get temperature and humidity numbers, mark the daily rise, and well, do it all again. But this time I wanted to take the same dough to 96 hours and see what would happen.

So last Thursday, I measured out everything to the gram, do all the mixing and kneading by hand and by the end, it appears way beyond the amount of wetness and stickiness that I would have expected. What I should have done was check the weight of the dough right then and there. Instead, I wrote it off to some variables like temps and humidity, placed it into a container and began the long ferment, all the while documenting the progress.

Fast-forward to today. It's lunchtime at my home and my wife is preparing some Japanese "somen" (cold noodles) while I am checking the weather forecast for Monday on my PC. To my surprise, it's been updated and shows rain from the afternoon. I can set up my canopies and we have baked on rainy days before, but it's just a P.I.T.A., so my wife and I decide that it'd be better to just have pizza tonight. The dough, at about the 69th hour, should be just fine, I'm thinking.

So I begin running the camera again, as I start weighing and balling, and again, I get this uncomfortable feeling that I blew it somewhere. This dough is just way stickier and wetter that I had expected. My original measurements were for 8 balls at 250g. To my initial horror, my seventh doughball went into the proofing tray with just about 110g of dough left. What went wrong was now clear. How wrong was not clear.

After finishing up, attending to my oven pre-heat, and pulling out my calculator, I estimated that I was missing about 140g of flour, making a hydration level of , not 61%, but 67%. That also upped the salt % and yeast too, but I wasn't worried about that. I had never dealt with such a moist dough at warm climate temps before. It was going to be interesting, I thought. And it was. I learned a lot from this mistake, such as how to handle an ultra-delicate dough and avoid catastrophe, and that the doughballs can relax enough to open in a very short time. And, as Chau predicted, I did like the resulting crust texture and have decided to keep this 67% one in my back pocket for occasions where I want to ball and bake within a shorter period of time than I usually do.

Anyway, you can see the entire experiment on my youtube channel. My next post will have these pics...

1. Crumbshot. Havarti/Mozz, Italian sausage, onion, bell pepper

2. Underside of the above.

3. Remember the 110 gram doughball that I had left? This is it. The World's Smallest (six inch) Margherita.